


In from the Cold

by cat_77



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, non-sexual nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-22
Updated: 2012-11-22
Packaged: 2017-11-19 06:54:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/570443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cat_77/pseuds/cat_77
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were more important things for her to think about. Like survival.  Like escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In from the Cold

**Author's Note:**

> For the "hunger/starvation" square at hc_bingo.
> 
> * * *

It was just food. That's what she told herself. It wasn't needed, not now, not when there were more important things to see to. Like survival. Like escape. Like getting to the safe house before she was caught. Again.

She pulled the battered jacket closer over the borrowed, stolen, clothing, and tried to think warm thoughts. The snow she had consumed had provided the liquid her body needed to survive, but even she knew she needed more than that.

Men huddled around a fire beneath a bridge. They took one look at her and offered her something vaguely amber colored in a dirty bottle. She knew better than to take it. They offered her a metal cup instead. She scoured it with the ice and filled it with more snow, let it melt and boil over the fire. That she drank with thanks. 

The rice and porridge mixture they offered smelled rancid, smelled wrong. Though she knew her body needed nutrition, actual food, sooner rather than later, she could not bring herself to eat it. Bile rose up from her stomach, burned her esophagus, and she shook her head, tried not to cover her mouth. She kept the cup, fingertips scorched upon it, and moved on.

She felt like a cliche when she stole a packet of biscuits from someone who looked away from her cart while trying to fit everything into the trunk of their old sedan. She huddled in the shadows and crammed too many in her mouth at once, body rebelling. She rinsed her mouth with water from the tap at a gas station bathroom, wondered if she could knock off the store for something a bit more solid, but figured she had paid the price for her thieving once already that day. Besides, she couldn't take the risk of the surveillance cameras catching her in the act.

She had cash. She had money. Just not on her and not somewhere she could get to yet. She had at least fifteen more miles to go to the safe house. The night was coming though, and the wind was strong and tinged with the smell of ozone, of rain that would freeze and turn to ice and eventually more snow. Her legs shook with exhaustion, her body swayed as she trudged through the worst of it. She holed up between two dumpsters for the night, the open lids providing a bit of relief from the storm. In the morning, she awoke to the sound of a door and pretended to sleep when the shopkeeper left her a steaming styrofoam mug of something that smelled like mint tea, and a wrapped up roll of bread.

She pocketed the bread and warmed her hands with the tea. She sipped at it for the first three miles, long after it had gone cold. She took tiny bites of the bread, pleased when most of them stayed down.

Finally. Finally she reached the safe house. She scanned in her frozen fingers and pried open her eyes for the probe, let the door snick shut behind her, and collapsed on the rug, too tired to even turn the heat up above its minimum setting. She tugged a blanket down from the nearby chair and drifted off into sleep.

She didn't know how long she lay there, but it was so much warmer, so much more comfortable than out in the cold. Her body was sluggish, so far from its peak performance to be truly and utterly pathetic. Still, when she heard a noise, heard the security protocols being overridden, she reached for the glock she knew was hidden under the nearby recliner, and took aim.

The door opened and a figure entered. "Nat?" the figure asked. Male. American. His voice sounded familiar, but his presence was not. A parka and scarf distorted his form and voice, ski pants and boots added weight and shape and made him unrecognizable.

She held the gun steady.

Gloved hands raised in a gesture of surrender. "Let me get this off so you know it's me," the voice pleaded. The hood fell back to reveal a stocking hat. That was removed to reveal spiky dirty blond hair. The scarf tugged free, crystals of ice shattering upon the floor, and a face was presented that she knew she should recognize, if only her foggy brain would catch up with the rest of the world.

"Nat, Natasha, it's me," the man said. He must have realized that was less than helpful as he added, "It's Clint."

"Barton?" she verified. And it made sense, in a way. Very few people knew about this place, and even fewer could get through the security protocols she herself had designed.

He crouched down beside her, worry coloring his slowly familiar features, and said, "Yeah, Tasha, it's me." He tugged off his gloves and ran a hand through his sweaty hair, scars and calluses showing her who it truly was as much as names and electronic IDs.

She lowered her weapon and collapsed back to the floor, body too tired to even shiver.

"Come on, babe, let's get you out of these wet clothes and someplace a little warmer," he urged.

"You don't get to call me babe," she protested, but let him lift her out of the puddle of muck she had been laying in.

He carried more than supported her on the way to the bathroom, ditched his parka and most of his gear outside the door and turned the shower on for her. When she did not immediately move towards it herself, he carefully peeled back the stubborn layers of her sodden clothing, providing no commentary as to their rankness or the state of her body beneath them.

He propped her up in the shower and disappeared for a moment. The water was like pins and needles against her battered skin, but it seemed so easy to give in to the warmth, to sink into it after being denied it for so long.

"Oh, no, no, no!" he said when he came to check on her, hours or minutes later. There was a rustle of cloth and then he was standing beside her, pulling her up and bracing her with his own body. A washcloth full of soap felt like steel wool upon her arms, and she watched idly as streaks of rust and black swirled down the drain. Hands tugged against the knots in her hair, bubbles of shampoo stung in her eyes. It seemed easier to close them anyway, so she did.

The water turned off and she leaned up against the cooling tile. A towel was drug across her, a pile of clothing ignored as being too difficult to manage, and a blissfully soft robe wrapped around her instead.

She was led not to bed, but to the kitchen table where a microwaved bowl of soup and a mug of tea sat before her. She sipped the tea, felt it burn a path through her, vaguely recognized the heat in the room had been turned up as she began to shiver now.

Clint was on the phone, a towel wrapped around his waist and another his shoulders. He paced, attention torn between her and whatever conversation he was having. "I found her. She's safe. No, you don't get to know where, not yet. I swear to fuck, Stark, if you try to trace this call I will end you." She heard these snippets interspersed with cajoling urges to, "Come on, try the soup. You need something more than tea."

She managed three, even four bites before it surged upwards. She rushed to the sink and spit it out, gripping on to the counter edge to try to stay upright.

She heard Clint behind her as she rinsed it down. "Fuck, I've got to go," he said, and then he was there, leading her back to the chair, sitting her down on it and smoothing her knotted hair away from her face. "Too long? How long, Tasha? Nat? Do you think you could handle some broth? We've got to have some broth here, right?" he asked, but she didn't know how to answer.

He found some cubes of bouillon in the cupboards and mixed them with hot water. She sipped at that mainly to keep him happy, used every bit of willpower she had to keep it down. Two cups was apparently enough for him, either that or he saw how she was struggling, and he placed the dishes in the sink and led her to the bedroom.

He pulled back the covers and pushed her down onto the softness, wrapped the sheets and comforter around her and then added more blankets that he found in the closet. He didn't even comment when she gripped his hand in thanks, the other clutching the blade she kept under the pillow.

"I'll keep watch," he promised. And she knew he would, knew he would stay up for days if needed, had before and would again. She sank into sleep and knew that, finally, she was safe again.

She woke in what she thought was the morning but the clock told her was late afternoon. She was reluctant to leave the warmth and comfort of the bed, but was pragmatic enough to know she would have to do so eventually, so she might as well now.

She stumbled to the kitchen less than gracefully and pried open a cupboard only to have her hands gently removed from the wood. "Want to try some food again?" Barton asked.

"Want to see if it will come up again?" she countered.

He snorted and heated more broth, this time with a side of dry toast. He placed it in front of her with a look that dared her to eat it, knowing she would not back down from such an obvious challenge. It stayed and, even though her stomach growled for more, she knew better than to take her chances.

Later, when she was dressed in sweatpants, a t-shirt, and a cardigan, after both of them worked to get her hair into some sort of semblance of order, he asked, "How long?"

"Aren't I supposed to ask you that?" she replied, warming her hands on yet more tea. She had seen him sweating in his shirt and jeans and lowered the thermostat even though she craved the warmth.

"You were taken just over ten days ago, the giant explosion that I am going to assume was your escape was four days later, and we have been looking for you ever since," he recited. He had a beer in his hand - not enough to be drunk or impaired, but enough to drive home the point that they were safe here, or at least as safe as they could be for now.

"How did you find me?" she asked, curiosity getting the better of her, another sign of weakness.

"The SHIELD safe house is eighteen miles in the opposite direction from the explosion. When you didn't show there, I had my suspicions. When Assam reported a homeless woman that matched your description, I had a few more. I checked out here to find the protocols had been tripped and was lucky enough to both remember how to reset them and to find you inside," he told her. He took a long pull from his bottle before he set it on the table before him. His fingers worried at the label in ways he would never admit to himself. "Do you even remember how you got here?" he finally asked.

She stared down at her tea, saw not the milky brown liquid, but almost clear in a rusty cup. "Most of it," she admitted. "The timeline is a little hazy though." She had no idea why she had not headed for the closer safe house, save for the fact one of the men that took her looked far too familiar and had known her whereabouts far too well. Instinct must have kicked in and she aimed for the one farther out, the one SHIELD and anyone who had hacked their systems wouldn't know about.

"Why didn't you call in?" he asked, and she knew he had been waiting for that answer possibly more than any other.

"They followed me for the first two days, almost caught me twice," she shrugged. "After that..." After that, it didn't seem as important. To just keep moving, to avoid detection, to get somewhere safe, those were the only things on her mind, the only things that drove her to continue. She knew he understood that, at least at some level.

"Cap went apeshit," Clint said, apropos of nothing. "Banner almost Hulked out on us, Stark started hacking satellites, and Thor tried searching but the storm was too much for even him, especially when he had no idea what he was looking for."

Team. She hadn't thought about them, about what they were going through, concentrating so much on her own selfish need to continue, to survive. She wasn't used to working with them yet, not after so many years alone. It took long enough to let Barton in, she didn't know if she could make room for the others as well, didn't know if she knew how.

"Where are they now?" she asked, suspecting the answer.

Clint scoffed, harsh and far from delicate. "Knowing Stark? Probably in the hotel in the city. He'd have traced me at least that far by now," he admitted.

"They won't come here?" she asked, a hint of panic showing through. She didn't know why. They were her team, she trusted them to watch her back just as they trusted her to watch theirs. Yet this safety, this escape, this thing that was hers and hers alone, was something that she was not sure she was ready to give up yet.

"For all I know, Thor is perched on the roof across the street, waiting for a signal," Clint told her. The timely crash of lightning from the latest storm made her curl her lips in a hint of a smile.

"He should come in from the cold," she said after far too long of a pause.

"I'll text Tony to call him back," he offered.

She was tempted, oh so very tempted, to open the door and call him in herself, but she just couldn't do it, not yet. She nodded and sipped her lukewarm tea.

Tomorrow. She would pack up her stuff and lock down the safe house tomorrow. They would head back to the city and have their grand reunion and she would let Stark fly her home in his fancy plane with everyone crowded too close around her. They would track down the double agent and set fire to his ruins and all would be well again, or as close to well as she was willing to get.

For now though, she enjoyed the space and the silence that they granted her, the warmth of their friendship even from this distance, and prepared herself for the inevitable deluge that was yet to come.

 

End.


End file.
